


let's call this the comeback, again

by eugenides (newamsterdam)



Category: Marvel, Marvel 616
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-26
Updated: 2013-07-26
Packaged: 2017-12-21 09:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/898562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newamsterdam/pseuds/eugenides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the people in clint barton's life have a way of coming back around.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let's call this the comeback, again

**Author's Note:**

> written for rraleighbecket@tumblr. happy birthday! 
> 
> set between hawkeye v4 #11 and #12

The thing that gets him—that really gets him, that sinks into his skin and hooks under his muscles and irritates him from the inside out, never letting up—is that he didn’t see this coming.

People are always leaving. He knows that better than anyone else ever could. And yet he didn’t see this coming. So Clint continues to sit in the same strained position, back hunched over and feet balanced on the rungs of the stool, hands curled around a now-cold mug of coffee. He’d laugh, if he wasn’t afraid of breaking down entirely. He’d curse, if it wouldn’t come out as a scream. Devoid of those two options, he sits in stark silence, staring down at his coffee and realizing, yes. He should have seen this coming.

I.

He was barely more than a boy when Barney left. His knees were always scuffed and scratched and he had the beginnings of what would be a lifetime of distinctive blisters gained from gripping a bow too tightly. His leg had been broken, too, as he stumbled out to the bus stop and realized he was just a few minutes too late. Barney was gone, and Clint was alone. That hadn’t been the first time—hadn’t his mother left? hadn’t his asshole of a father taken her with him?—but it was the first time he let himself feel it. He threw himself down on the dusty ground and told himself his leg was hurting and his whole body ached, and that was why he was crying.

That was the first of many lies Clint Barton would tell himself, over the years.

In the kitchen, leaning against the counter and perched on his stool, Clint stares into his coffee. “Fuckin’ Barney,” he says, and his voice rings strangely in his own ears.

Because his brother wouldn’t leave him be. He continued to be a shadow, haunting Clint’s every step. Hawkeye hadn’t even gone by his own name, for years, because of what his brother was. But then he’d watched his brother die, and reclaimed a family name he thought he no longer wanted. He’d grown used to being Hawkeye _and_ Clint Barton, and realized maybe the two weren’t so separate. That didn’t make the loss of Barney easy, but it made it bearable. Eventually, the pain faded to a dull ache that only smarted when he thought about it. (He thought about it a lot.)

But Barney came back. Unexpected, as soon as Clint had managed to forget. Like a boomerang he’d thrown in haste, that’d swung back around to hit him in the back of the head. (That would never actually happen to Clint; he’s always too precise.)

“Good way to think about it, though,” Clint tells his coffee. (It’s all he has left.) “He keeps coming back around.”

II.

Eventually, Clint pulls his palm away from the mug of coffee and stares at it. The same familiar blisters and scars, burning red from gripping the mug so long. Red has never really been his color, but he’d learned to love it, once upon a time. It feels like a dream, now: Natasha’s red hair. It’s been so long, since he’s run his hands through it. Since he’s let her overwhelm him entirely, hair over them both like a curtain cut of sunset, and his lips against the knot of her throat.

“You’re a dream,” he’d told her once. “You’re a dream, you’re too good to be true, there’s no way a woman like you could be real, could be here with me…”

She’d smiled at him in her veiled way—she was always half-guarded—and kissed him right between the eyes. The same place she’d aim a shot, if she wanted to kill him, but this was so much more effective.

(When he said she was a dream, he didn’t just mean she was too good to be true. He meant she was transient, that she’d fade away and leave him with nothing left in his hands. He was right, about that.)

“Tell me you don’t love me,” he’d demanded of her, so much later.

He pretended not to see the tears in her eyes when she declared there had never been anything between them. He had been young, self-centered, too consumed by his own pain to notice or care for hers. And she’d left, just like he’d always expected her to. She was a living flame, and he was just a man. He couldn’t hold her in his hands, and eventually he’d burned and let her go.

Now he stares at his hand, still red. He shifts his head, a bit, turns around despite the way his back muscles scream in protest, and glances at the calendar on the back wall. And, sure enough, there it is—circled in red. A date next week, sparring at the Tower with Natasha.

Because Barney’s not the only one who came back around. Natasha would never be anything so straightforward as a boomerang; she’s more like a comet, caught in different orbits and creating its own. If you’re lucky, you can catch a glimpse once. If you’re smart, you learn how to find it again the next time it comes around. Yes, Natasha is a comet. And maybe he still doesn’t understand her, but he’s learned how to adjust his orbit to hers all the same. Her gravity’s too strong for him to have done anything else.

(Sometimes he still dreams about the way it had been. But he keeps those thoughts to himself. It’s not what she needs from him.)

III.

The phone’s ringing.

“How do you keep doing this to yourself, Barton?” he demands of himself. He pushes off from the counter, walks over to wear the phone hangs on the wall. “What?” he says when he picks up, without any kind of preamble.

“Nice to hear from you too, Clint.” Steve’s voice is placid, calm. “You haven’t been answering your ID.”

The ID’s still sitting on the coffee table in the living room, half-slipped out of one of the pouches on his belt. He’d discarded it there two days ago. There are different alerts, different frequencies, for emergencies and more mundane business.

“I figured it wasn’t important.”

He can almost hear Steve grit his teeth, and if this was any other day Clint would smile, because if there’s one thing he’s good at it’s getting a rise out of Captain America. For a while that had been his sole purpose in life, taking jabs at the older man. Steve was a constant, a shining beacon. A lighthouse, maybe, because Clint likes boats and thinks often that if he wasn’t a superhero and couldn’t be a cowboy, maybe he would’ve made a good sailor.

(Steve would be the Captain, of the ship. Clint would be navigator, if he was lucky, and didn’t fuck up too much along the way.)

“Clint,” Steve begins, after a moment. Clint knows that tone, that barely-suppressed sigh. Steve knows something is wrong, and he’s about to ask what it is. Clint can’t let him. He can’t talk about it. He can’t talk about Grills, and the dog, and—

“Was it important?” Clint demands. He knows it wasn’t. He’d never skip out on important Avengers’ business. They mean too much to him, for that.

Steve is silent for a moment. “Jan’s organizing movie night this week. If you’re not there…” He lets the words hang. The captain tactfully doesn’t mention that the last time the three of them—Janet and Clint and Steve—organized a movie night, it had been before all three of them died.

Because as steady as Steve is, as much Clint can rely on him to be there and be an easy target, he left, too. He got shot right in the chest and slipped away to some other plain of existence that even now Clint doesn’t understand. And Clint was damaged and broken and felt like every moment was another in which his molecules were being disassembled, again and again, and he needed Steve to be there and Steve wasn’t.

(Steve was dead, or so they’d thought.)

“I never said I wasn’t coming,” he snaps into the phone. He hangs up on Steve, then, and holds the knowledge close to his chest that he still can, that the lighthouse is still burning with light somewhere against the shore, and he doesn’t have to navigate his life without it any more.

(He can hang up without apology because there’s someone to hang up on. It’s a nice, constant feeling.)

IV.

It’s only three in the afternoon but Clint’s considering going to bed, anyway. He’s still in sweats and a t-shirt, the same clothes he’s been wearing for—how many days, now? He can’t remember. It’s not like him to be so imprecise. But there’s also something comforting about not caring. It’s easier, in many ways.

He forces himself away from the kitchen and into the living room. (They aren’t actually separate rooms, there’s no wall.)

He picks up his belt from across the table and plucks out his ID card. Six alerts, three of them from Steve. One from Janet, one from Tony. And one…

There’s a box, somewhere in his apartment. Probably only a few yards away from him, the one he hasn’t unpacked even though he has long since declared this place home. In that box are photographs, and sandwiched between a post-card of the West Coast Avengers’ barbeque and a crumpled snapshot of the Thunderbolts—why does he still have that one?—is a wedding photograph.

In it, Bobbi Morse (Barbara Jo Morse Barton) is wearing jean shorts and a loose white blouse. Her blonde hair is windswept and her head is arched back as she laughs and laughs. She’s not wearing a ring, but both her arms are looped around Clint’s neck, and one of her legs is hooked behind his knee, pulling him in. Clint’s wearing purple, of course, and a pair of jeans, and his eyes are closed because he’s smiling so wide.

He’d fucked that up too, of course. Couldn’t keep it together, couldn’t be a proper husband, couldn’t save his wife. She’d saved him, instead, and he’d watched her fade away in front of him.

There’d been no pretenses, then. He’d cried and cried and everyone knew what he was crying for.

But that hadn’t even been her. He still has a strange time reconciling that fact, rewriting his own memories to deal with the reality. But the alternative is a world in which she does not exist, so he accepts the uncanny qualities of his life.

She’d left, but he’d driven her away. She’d died, but she’d died saving him. She’d come back, but only to reveal it had all been something else.

“An alien invasion,” Clint mutters to the wall. “Because _that_ is my life.”

Bobbi Morse is California sunshine. (She’s from Georgia.) It’s constant and radiant and you start taking it for granted if you’re not careful. But even if it rains one day, the sunshine comes back. It’s there more often than not.

(The trick is remembering to appreciate it.)

Clint makes a mental note to call Bobbi back, to resist making a snarky remark about the divorce papers and ask her (really ask her) how she’s doing. If she’s happy.

Then he tosses the belt and the ID against the couch.

V.

He’s making his way back up the stairs when he stumbles, grabs the railing to keep from landing on either his ass or his face. Neither one could use a new bruise.

He thinks about how he was off, last time he bothered to practice shooting. He’s going to be sore and out of shape when he keeps that date with Natasha. She’s going to hand him his ass on a silver platter. He’d commiserated about that, once, with Barnes. Right after they’d finished sparring, themselves. Steve had still been too raw a topic, one neither of them wanted to broach. And so—

“Sorry for knocking into you, back there.”

“Natasha said you had a hard head. Now I know why.”

“What? Hey, just ‘cause I can—”

“Oh, calm down, Barton. I think she meant it as a compliment.”

“What?”

“I challenged you because she suggested it. Said maybe knocking our heads together would knock some sense, into both of us.”

Because they’re more alike than either of them wanted to admit. The first time Clint had heard about Bucky Barnes—so many, many years ago—he’d declared the kid would have made a good Avenger. That’s still the highest compliment he can give, the most honest praise. Even if they didn’t get along, per say, Clint was glad when Barnes was around. Even if he’d never admit it.

He tried not to look, at either Natasha or Steve, when the kid bled out and got stabbed through the chest. But somehow prioritizing their grief was a better way to handle it, a way to get through it without thinking about this kid who was actually decades older than him and so much harder.

(He didn’t agree with Barnes on a lot of things. He didn’t even like him. But he missed him, when he was gone.)

Clint picks himself up off the staircase and determinedly puts one foot in front of the other. Barnes is an asshole, truth be told. What kind of sick jerk fakes their own death? But maybe it’s not Clint’s place to say.

Barnes, as far as Clint is concerned, deserves a punch for everything he’s put them through. Maybe more than one. Hard and quick, right to the face, forceful enough to draw blood. The kid’s an explosion, burning bright and making waves before fading out entirely. You don’t expect an explosion to burst suddenly again into flames, years later, but apparently it’s something Barnes has made a habit of. And Clint’s sick of things that don’t make any damn sense.

He slouches into his bedroom, throws himself down face-first onto the bed. Lucky usually barks, joins him up there.

(He won’t, anymore.)

VI.

Clint lifts his head and stares at the wall. The people in his life have a way of leaving. Everyone does it, at some point or another.

But they come back around, too.

“Be safe out there, Katie,” he mumbles. He’s not going to drag anyone back to him. But he can believe they’ll—she’ll—return on her own. After all, evidence suggests that’s the way this pattern plays out. 


End file.
